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July 19, 2015

right, donald trump has got to go. but not because he sort of made nasty cracks about john mccain. his rivals are saying things like 'that disqualifies him for the presidency'. pretty soon we'll be publicly flogging people for failing to refer to all who who have been in the military - timothy mcveigh, e.g. - as "america's heroes." 'i will say what i want to say': that should be a slogan for everyone. we have really reached the maximum of pc pall and the correlative cowardice: you wouldn't think we could have a safer, emptier, more dishonest presidential campaign than the last few, but we are going to. the supernatural power of phonemes and abstract designs (rebel flag) is self-evident to everyone, especially young people. both with your mouth and with your ears: show some fucking guts, little bitches. we'll never address race in this country, e.g. we'll just mutter pablum in unison and intern anyone who says...anything.

you're going to need to generate a list of all the things no one is permitted to say. sadly it's going to require infinitely many of you little monkeys and infinitely many typewriters, because there are infinitely many things we are not permitted to say.

May 07, 2015

you'd have to say that this and this are promising, though relatively small, smackdowns of the surveilance state. nothing has ever been more obviously unconstitutional. nothing would more obviously make george washington go fetch his flintlock, raise an army, and engage in violent insurrection, as he did in the good ole days.

April 12, 2015

if you are not an anarchist, your are in favor of this: thousands of police killings done with impunity. killing with impunity is the very essence of state power, or a good definition of 'government'. say you cannot picture human life as possible without police. well, what you are thinking is that human life is impossible without arming some people heavily against others and authorizing them to commit what would be crimes for others or, looking at it another way, giving some people rights that others do not enjoy, including the right to control those others' bodies or damage them: that is what a policeman is. you think it's the rule of law but by your own account it is the rule of crime: these people can kidnap you and hold you for cash, for example, or tase you, or just beat the shit out of you or kill you. if you think that a total asymmetry of power like that is necessary, then just accept all its inevitable results. one thing you should absolutely expect, one thing you are practically endorsing: this asymmetry will mirror all the others: if you are a statist, you practically endorse beating those on the bottom of whatever hierarchies there are: economic, racial, etc. also, power of the sort you are enthusing about or regarding as a baseline necessity of human life is, given what human beings are, always abused. and also, given what human beings are, it is resented, and will be violently resented. admit it: this is what you want. so stop whining about it or hop off this state jive.

April 09, 2015

amazingly, michael slager, who shot walter scott eight times in the back as he was fleeing, was listening to this beautiful song about human connections across various barriers as he pulled scott over.

one lesson that all sorts of people are drawing is: when the police tell you what to do, do it. black men such as mark morial and don lemon are saying that on cnn as i write. i understand why they say that, and they are trying to keep people alive. but on their own account, they are endorsing sheer capitulation to a regime they themselves regard as a regime of racist violence. lemon said: 'never run from the police. running from the police never works out.' depends on how fast and clever you are, son, and i'm telling you from my own ancient experiences that sometimes it works out just fine.

February 14, 2015

sorry for no blogging. i'm on a writing project in lisbon, believe it or not, doing an essay for a book on the very wonderful joana vasconcelos.

those giant heels are made from pots and potlids, and are installed here in versailles.

but i am back to blog briefly about the attack on the free speech conference in copenhagen. i fucking hate a totalitarian: anyone who thinks that they should be telling people how to talk or draw or write, or for that matter live. i do not care if you are an islamist, a fascist, a communist: you are all the same. as explicitly as possible you advocate obvious evil. i feel the same though more mildly for more mild versions, like say mainstream left or right politics. try perhaps applying the golden rule or something, or having some kind of rudimentary moral insight, because you are failing in that continually even as you pose as some sort of moralist.

i don't quite tell my mother this - she comes from straight party members - but baby, this is an easy mistake not to make. i don't care if the communist party is the basic alternative to fascism, or for that matter vice versa: you are just making an obvious howler in the most flamboyant possible fashion. your heart, whatever you may think, is not in the right place. give up the desire to subordinate and the desire to be subordinated and we might become a species that deserves to survive. if not, not. (fifty shades of grey might be a shitty novel and film, but it is a good allegory of human political history: a basic explanation of our situation.) also, while you're at it, stop pretending that the realization of your desire to subordinate or to be subordinated is the alternative to us being isolated individuals and so lonely and stuff, that you subordinating me or vice versa is the creation of a shared group identity. or putting it another way, what about the collective? because this argument is gross. it's ill. it couldn't be more obviously disingenuous. we'll come together because we are together and want to be together.

but joana vasconcelos's work is anti-totalitarian; i'll be writing about that.

December 28, 2014

I went to see the doctor of philosophyWith a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his kneeHe never did marry or see a B-grade movieHe graded my performance, he said he could see through meI spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paperAnd I was free. -- Ray and Saliers

When I turn to philosophy and pick up a new work, the technical stuff makes me think that perhaps the idea to burn the Great Library of Alexandria was not such a bad one after all. Langugae that serves only to drive the potential reader away deserves to be forgotten. Of course, doctoral disseratations don't succeed so much by provoking new thought as by providing variations on an accepted theme of bullshit. The great thinkers succeed in reaching us by doing other things that producing tomes suitable more for tombs that thought, realization and excited discussion.

Daniel Dennett is an interesting and provocative thinker; while I like his simile about human beings as "moist robots", he seems here to be edging away from that. The robot part takes us so far, and then there's an entirely different set of functions,problems and issues. Two things I liked here is the issue of intentionality -- free will requires philosophical intention, that is, conscienious direction and awareness and it requires the ability to recognize and prevent manipulation. The moral actor has to go into situations with eyes wide open and a poker face. The other, which I think is implied, is that the initial reaction to radically new perspectives seems to be to regard it as either naive or cynical, until you think about it.

My other thought is simple. I find Dennett's technical philosophy, the neuroscientist-philosopher stuff incomprehensible, but when he writes or speaks to communicate with actual living people, he's very good indeed. Is that a trend? Crispin's thought is much the same way, although since he doesn't babble about neurons and synapses and blood volume and all the rest, he's more approachable. Sartre was the same way -- you can read "Being and Nothingness", or you can read "The Words" or "No Exit and three Plays" and the first will drive you to distraction, solitary despair and isolated absinthe sucking through a sugar cube; the others will engage, provoke conversastion and maybe...cause thought.

October 17, 2014

I realized recently that I have made several attempts at the blogging equivalent of the unified field theory, that is, following part I of an essay several days later with part II. I just don't usually do that because I'm lazy and easily distracted.

But the continuing debacle of policy and politics that has prevailed since Bush and the Rehnquist stole the Supreme Court 14 years ago has hit a point where the outrage meter is pegged out here, and it's easy to remember why I was so pissed off the first time.

I admit that I consider the Republicans in the House and Senate, the leaders especially, to be lower on the chain of consciousness than sunflowers and slugs. But I have absolutely no clue what the President is doing and why...he's a smart guy. OK, got it; so was Herbert Hoover. He's trying to be Kennedyesque, except most of us who remember John Kennedy and Bobby are members of AARP. Being Kennedyesque today comes off as Mike Dukakis.

So between them, I'm irked. And, this Ebola Czar nonsense is insane. McCain the Rs have a bad idea -- we need a Czar! Long live th Czar!'; Obama appoints one, and they start screaming "Not that one; another one." Meanwhile, we have a very logical CZAR, the unconfirmed head of the National Health Service. Since nobody in Congress is bothering to pretend to do anything, aren't they recessed? Couldn't Obama appoint him? Or at least make him the CZAR? Nah...too easy.

September 12, 2014

"How does she marry him after that? How does she go in front of (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell? That's pathetic to me," Robinson said during the radio segment, according to CBS Sports.

he was suspended. or how about the atlanta hawks owner talking about the economic implications of the racial makeup of the crowds at hawks games, in a way almost anyone might in that position? he had to sell out the day it was reported. just make up your mind to this: speech is not assault. and for god's sake, stop becoming outraged at people for saying even things that you are yourself, or that very many people, are thinking. there's no percentage in that. people do not want there to be any public actual discussion of anything, in particular race and gender. they want everyone chanting the same pc cliches in unison.

the baseline is that anyone gets to say whatever they like, and what you are doing is forcing dishonesty on everyone, even yourself. after that, you're going to wonder why no one appears to be a racist or sexist in a society that is structurally racist and sexist. my basic explanation of this always-apparently-mysterious fact is that it's one of the effects of of the overwhelming social sanctions against using certain words or expressing certain thoughts in public space. i think people really are or were confused between racism and the vocabulary of racism, sexism and the vocabulary of sexism: people seriously held the view that it would be a substantive improvement in the condition of women if no one ever used 'chick' or even 'girl', ever again.

pretty soon, not only is everyone policing every word out of their own mouths, they are editing their own thoughts, or trying to, because they themselves believe that the basic thing that makes you a racist is that the word 'nigger' crosses your mind. that is, the general theory that drives the policing of speech - the idea that reality is the result of our simultaneous incantations - itself becomes widely accepted and applied. then if you do kind of edit that stuff out of your own internal monologue, you believe of yourself that you cannot be a racist. that would actually be true if the 'words-have-power' magick theory of reality were true. the ever-more thorough and effective censorship regimes around racism and sexism combined with the mysterious persistence of the hierarchies themselves actually show that words are shit. or proverbially: talk is cheap. surely anyone who has lived among humans has learned this lesson, and no one can have better data on that than members of oppressed groups.

July 24, 2014

how was i not paying any attention to this? meanwhile on the world stage we have never stopped congratulating ourselves for our freedom, contrasting the us in this respect to whomever we are ragging on at the moment. thanks, adam.

May 05, 2014

ah, the common core. the thing richly justifies violent revolution, which i would definitely recommend if it cannot be blown up through electoral politics. now i realize that there's an emerging demographic progressivism, and that women, black people, latinos, and gay folk unanimously want to be personally subordinated by idiots. only white het guys don't want a personal overseer following them around and telling them what to do all day: a symptom of our privilege. on the other hand, slavishness is one possible result of being oppressed. who, they ask, will duct-tape my child to a chair and force her little hand to move, in unison with all the other little hands, as some numskull prescribes? you've got to think about the collective, not just the individual. if there was someone who could tell us all what to do all day, and with the guns, money, and internment facilities to make it stick, we would be as one. but perhaps somewhere there are non-masochists even in these groups and we can cobble together an anti-sadist alliance.

March 19, 2014

so apparently rand is going to remark this evening that it is not clear who is running the government of the united states. it is a united states senator, hinting at the awful truth: intelligence coup. the brennan-feinstein conflagration is where this pinches immediately on the senate. got a little prediction for you, though. in the next few weeks, some sort of scandal will bloom around rand paul. if it does, here is the likeliest etiology: leaked by intelligence sources through several insulating layers to rachel maddow or chris hayes. they're going to want msnbc doing to him what it did to christie: day after day of relentless coverage. or honestly, fox is almost as hostile, and that's where you'd want to destroy him for the republican nomination. they will want him to understand who did it, so they will convey their own responsibility one way or another.

February 27, 2014

evil idiots are peering at you through your webcam. meanwhile, everyone from secretaries of state to eminent professors are still yapping about democracy, as though that had anything to do with anything. really political theory devoted to democracy is just a form of fantasy fiction, and the continued verbal assertion by barack or kerry that the united states is a democracy or supports democracy is just the ridiculous ideological yipyap of slave-drivers. this here is precisely where american democracy ended up; until you show me differently i will assume this is what you always meant: a secret regime of total surveillance: an allday everyday home invasion of everyone, paid for by themselves under coercion. here would be my policy directive to the leaders and employees of the nsa, sort of a minimum baseline: do not act so as to richly deserve death by torture. you fail utterly by this standard. so i'm going to ask again: what are we going to do about it? who are we, really? we are grovellers, snivellers; we are servile, broken. as persons, we no longer exist. quoting nathaniel peabody rogers: The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals.

February 21, 2014

venezuela, ukraine: there they have pride. there they want freedom. here, we face one of the most effective exercises of totalitarian power ever created: a universal system of continual surveillance. why aren't we out in the streets, filling molotov cocktails and erecting barriers against storm troopers? because americans of our time hate and fear liberty, and love and respond sexually to their own subordination. all we want is to be raped by repulsive idiots such as james ("fucking") clapper.

russia is capable of producing pussy riots. we are capable only of producing squads of hillary clintons: currently focus-grouping her positions and indeed her entire personality.

January 20, 2014

obama and many other rationalizers of oppression take this approach, among a hundred other distractions, red herrings, etc, to the nsa: hey google and facebook do it, so hahaha! first of all, no they don't, in many dimensions. really do you think facebook is putting backdoor code into google, etc? but here's the thing: i'll be as worried about google or verizon having my info as i am about the us government when google has 'the greatest military the world has ever known', sprawling systems of incarceration, the power of coercive taxation, thousands of heavily armed thugs in suits, predator drones, high-end torturers, and so on. until then, take this argument and stick it.

on aca and nsa: i was always opposed to the individual mandate on fundamental 'what the gov could legitimately do' grounds. but on the other hand i took a strategy that i've taken to lately: well, if i were screaming, this isn't the first thing i'd scream about, because actually it sucks that people don't have access to healthcare. but reading the healthcare law through the nsa: we are dealing with a government that really has no respect for the autonomy, privacy, or liberty of anyone. so, for one thing, all info you provide to these exchanges is available to corporations, is available to the nsa, is available to homeland security, immigration, irs etc. the aca crystallizes as a very serious dimension of authoritarian control and insufferable, indefensible, and extremely threatening surveillance. the latter is what really has put paid to the american political tradition. obviously, the whole thing is cheneyesque, and if you think i didn't or don't blame the bush admin, you're wrong. but for the dems, it fits in really with a vision of state dominance of every aspect of human life: the economy, education, health, information, etc. it fits with the idea that individual rights is bourgeois ideology (which of course is a remark that has only ever been made by members of the bourgeoisie). they really believe that actual human beings have no rights their government is bound to respect, on the hilarious grounds - the obviously false and entirely disingenuous grounds - that after all the government is all of us working together: it is our collective identity, and there's no such thing as individual identity. that's why we're coercing and surveiling you in every possible aspect: because that's actually who you are even though you may be confused about that. the ridiculousness of that doctrine is matched only by its disastrous consequences: it is a premonition of genocide.

at any rate, you might think about a situation in which you are dependent for your most basic needs, for your life itself, on someone who is all the while abusing you. say you are gendergapy leftish woman. you could perhaps reflect on the fact that this is what you want, or at least what you vote for. otherwise i'll be blaming the victims, at least such victims as are enthusiastic endorsers of and collaborators in their own abuse. look, she wanted it all along: every blow was justified by her own desire. yes i monitored her every move; that's why i couldn't let her out of the basement: because i love her, really. and of course i was feeding her the whole time, so why is she whining now over there at the shelter? try not to be a people of whom that is actually true (as reflected in polling or voting, e.g.), is my advice to us.

November 19, 2013

on the anniversary of the gettysburg address, i want to point out the completely obvious fact that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has perished from the earth. that concept is from an entirely different set of political commitments than, say, an effective government program of universal surveillance. but it is obviously, breathtakingly incompatible with the idea that such a program is a state secret. this is the thread that connects obama with lincoln: the first black president has participated enthusiastically in everything lincoln fought the civil war, by his own account, to destroy. were lincoln around now he would, unlike daniel day-lewis, be raising a rebel army, possibly in the south and west, to resist the enslavement of everyone directly by the government of the united states. thoreau and douglass got a little pissy about the fugitive slave law: they thought this meant that, for example, the government of massachussetts was implicated in slavery, and hence that they were themselves implicated as citizens and taxpayers. the dred scott decision is being enforced, now, on us all: we have no rights that the government of the united states is bound to respect. we're all niggers, baby.

universal surveillance, again, is not every aspect of totalitarianism. but it entails, if you also have overwhelming police or military force, every other aspect of totalitarisnism. obviously, the government is inside the internet and the companies that run it etc to the tune of being able to control media and communications much more thoroughly if they want. indeed, we have no idea to what extent they actually do; they are certainly already monitoring such things in every respect. they know where you are if they need to grab you, and it is extremely unlikely that you could evade them for long if they wanted to catch you. they have enough on you to throw you in jail, i predict, if they are in the mood, or blackmail you into doing what they say, including saying what they tell you to say. put it this way: much active totalitarianism is actually in place, and every possible aspect of it is implied by the powers these people claim and the means they have to exercise those powers. plus resistance is futile. it is. perished from the earth, y'all.

in terms of a comparison to american slavery itself, the current situation does not feature very common officially-sanctioned rape, for example, or routinely break up families or literally work people to death, usually. but first off, american slavery depended absolutely fundamentally on surveillance: ponder well the word 'overseer.' it depended on a system of surveillance that basically included as agents all the white people of america who wouldn't go to heroic lengths to violate the law. every white community in the south was mobilized to watch the slaves, and they were twisted to monitor each other. but the degree of surveillance operated by the united states government today would give a plantation-owner an orgasm: if he knows what they're doing at all times, he can take steps to control them completely. no escape.

one thing to focus on in the text of the address is the relative roles of liberty and equality. on the anniversary and for the last x decades, the equality part has been relentlessly emphasized. and equality is certainly one good reason to try to emancipate slaves. but i think that any purported opposition or tension between these concepts forces you into extremely unfortunate political orientations. so, first of all, lincoln's and founder's basic vision of equality is equality precisely of liberty, and any plausible vision of human equality has to include that. where many or most people are subordinated politically, and even if that subordination is used to try to level incomes, for example, you have a profoundly unequal society. (also, in such a situation, incomes overall are extremely unlikely to move toward equality, because the subordinating power is actually a bunch of people, operating this subordinating power at least in part for their own benefit, and inevitably constituting a frozen economic as well as political hierarchy.) and i do want to suggest that people read that address again and see the extent to which it really does crystallize on liberty, or consider that as the central message of america.

why were abolitionists, including, very eventually, lincoln, opposed to slavery? because they were advocates equal basic rights, because they were committed to human liberty. they were individualists, even. but surely you can see that this is itself an egalitarian position. it is not every aspect of egalitarianism; it is an imprtant aspect, and the rest is nonsense without it.

November 17, 2013

somehow, anonymous keeps rocking. in my view, anyone who has the ability to disrupt, sabotage, or destroy the u.s. government's information infrastructure is morally obligated to do so. it is at the center of world oppression, and will be the basis of a new surveillance-based totalitarianism from which no one, anywhere in the world, is safe.

August 23, 2013

A Barely-Detectable Sideways Smile

By Crispin Sartwell

Knowledge, as educators like to intone, is power. If it is,
then a universal system of surveillance is power indeed. So much so, I believe,
that we have no idea - or at least, we did not until Edward Snowden's
revelations - what our actual form of government is. We have no idea who's in
charge and what policies they are in fact pursuing; we have no idea how the
powers and institutions of the government are really arranged and coordinated.

Whoever runs a
secret system of total surveillance - I mean whoever has day-to-day management
of the thing - is the person in charge of the country. Perhaps this is actually
Barack Obama. Perhaps it is NSA head Keith Alexander. Perhaps it is someone we have never
heard of.

Consider, for example, the
congressional defenders of the NSA programs. Now, a Congressman - Mike
Rogers, say - might be tempted to oppose the thing on the grotesquely obvious
grounds that it is entirely incompatible with the basic liberties America was
founded to preserve, the form of government prescribed by the Constitution,
human decency, and so forth. However, Alexander or whoever it
may be has a very simple technique for turning such a person around on a dime:
he just gives you a flicker of eyebrow or a barely-detectable sideways smile.
That's when you start trying to remember every communication you've had over
the last decade. After that, you do what he wants you to do.

If all that sounds hyperbolic, consider
this: last year, someone was pawing through the email of David Petraeus, the
director of the CIA. Now David Petraeus was one of the most powerful people
in the world, a fellow who could rain death on you from the sky wherever you
were huddled. The person or people who had access to his communications ended
Petraeus's career. Someone who can control or destroy the CIA Director can
control or destroy anyone who is not a saint, if he has similar access to their
communications. And people who rise to positions of power, it seems to me, are
considerably less likely to be saints than members of he population as a whole.

Putting it mildly, a
situation in which a population cannot know how their government actually
operates - for example, the period during which Egyptians were under the
delusion that they had elected their head of state - cannot be a democracy. Imagine
what the government of the United States would have been if J. Edgar Hoover had
achieved omniscience.

A
person who controls a universal system of surveillance can control the
president. He can appoint or delete members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He
can work over the Supreme Court like Whitey Bulger working over a snitch. He
can flick away attempts by other agencies or powers to rein him in. This replacement
of democracy with blackmail conceived as a national security imperative was the
essence of Hoover's approach, only he didn't have perfect information.
When you create a universal system of surveillance, you create a shadow
government that runs the country.

For such reasons, I wouldn't merely
assume that the advocates of the programs, from Obama on down, are sincere.
(Snowden asserted, recall, that he could access Obama's communications if he
had his email address; everything else Snowden has revealed has been borne out,
I believe.) Indeed, to assume that the defenders of the program believe what
they're saying is also to assume that they are profoundly evil. It's far more
charitable to figure that they're being worked like marionettes.

If Keith Alexander indeed controls the
various NSA surveillance programs revealed by Snowden, then he is either the de
facto Dear Leader for Life of America, or he is engaged in an act of sheer
charity: he's permitting people to keep whatever power they retain and America
to keep whatever shreds or symbols of its political traditions we hold on to.

You might go to DC to see the Capitol, the
Supreme Court, the Archives, the White House, and so forth. What you'll need to
realize on your jaunt is that the whole thing is a kind of historical
re-enactment; DC might as well be Colonial Williamsburg. They're still miming
the legislative process, judicial review, Commander in Chiefdom, and so on,
which will have some historical interest for any tourist. But you might want to
stick to Williamsburg. It 's more realistic.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science and philosophy at
Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

August 22, 2013

yes, we might all have to abandon the internet because of its colonization by the secret police, as these very reasonable people show. it'll be ok. we'll miss it, but you know, 25 years ago we puttered along without it.

August 21, 2013

all i do is complain. so now i'd like to suggest a proactive twobirds solution to various problems. i'd like to transpose the assad regime and its whole arsenal to ft. meade maryland, and let him have a crack at nsa headquarters. however the conflict comes out, as long as there is excruciating suffering, the world wins. they can argue as they croak about whose authority is less legitimate, who is more enthusiastic about or effective in subordinating their own population, who's the more shameless screeching liar and so on.

August 18, 2013

i just want to register that i completely agree with the decision vitiating stop and frisk in nyc. the profiling aspect of it is luridly disgusting, but even if that was not at its center, it is clearly unconstitutional and profoundly oppressive. of course, the nsa is frisking everyone all day. it's good if they're not particularly targeting black people, though it wouldn't be surprising if they rummaged a little harder about the persons of muslims, opponents of current american regime, and so on. i am delighting in whatever i can find of backlash against these sorts of oppressions, though honestly my hopes for the future of human freedom are extremely muted.

August 01, 2013

really, the russian aspect of l'affaire snowden is too damn bad. it somewhat pollutes the whole thing, and one assumes that he is no fan of vlad. but the man had few or no options: i don't think he was ever going to make it to latin america. it's good that he's alive, and i pray he can keep working with greenwald etc.

July 31, 2013

like keith alexander, i too have a request for the world's hackers: bring the nsa to its knees; destroy it entirely, leaving nothing but a smoking fucking hole where the information used to be; make keith alexander whine like a little bitch and beg for mercy.

"We stand for freedom,” Alexander told the crowd in a vast ballroom at Caesars Palace.

if you really stand for freedom, keith, then slit your wrists, turn on the gas and stick your head in the oven, and shoot yourself. that would be a heroic blow for liberty. he made the ultimate sacrifice for his country. i won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me.

whatever they do to bradley manning, i want to hear his voice. i like assange's statement: revealing important information to the public cannot be espionage. indeed, it is the opposite of espionage. by the way, of course, if espionage is illegal then the us government has a variety of huge bureaucracies entirely devoted to felonious activity. well, that's the very essence of state power, its precise center, its central reality: we exempt ourselves from the rules we impose on you. there are huge sprawling ministries of killing people, taking people's stuff without their permission, and so on and on. try to remember this the next time someone is going all 'rule of law,' etc. it seems impossible, but maybe they believe that they believe it. but they show they don't all day every day on a monumental gigantical scale. this is a very good way to define the state = those exempted from the rules they impose on others, or, institutionalized hypocrisy. literally it's a caste system in every case. people funny boy.

that baby crying is a lot of people's candidate for the first sample. probably not, but in this case you can draw a direct line to dub, dj, and hip hop, so it makes sense.

July 15, 2013

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden possesses enough information to cause more damage to the United States government than “anyone else has ever had in the history” of the country, according to the journalist who first reported the former contractor’s leaked documents.

i said from the outset that i hope snowden has a doomsday device. however, i think i would have hesitated to give these sorts of quotes if i were greenwald. it does suggest that the only solution from the us gov's point of view is extreme: extreme search and raid procedures, covert murder ops, and so on. it might get really bad; it might already be getting bad.

once again: the zimmerman trial, which is not even a particularly good racial emblem, is just nowhere near as important as the nsa story. this is true, i believe, even if you are raising a young black man, etc.: this is about a total system of surveillance affecting such people no less than everyone else. this is about a future of totalitarianism over the whole earth. i guess we can have another national conversation about race; i'm already bored; i can rehearse the whole thing in terms of the series of slogans or cliches of our leaders on both sides in my head. let's have a national conversation about the way all of us are being subordinated together, shall we?

i'm happy to talk about race; i do it all the time. i'll talk to you about it. i actually want to reflect on my own racial attitudes; i've tried. but the national conversation just consists of politicians and thought leaders and race leaders saying the same careful crap over and over and over. one problem is the familiar one: none of these people feels obliged to speak as or for themselves; they're representing demographics, bureaucracies, and so on. the sincerity of what they're saying is a question that does not even arise.